Getting to Know the Badlands

Tuesday, August 25, 2015 was a big day:  we were going to get to know the Badlands of South Dakota!  Here's a selfie we took with our friend Badlands National Park:

Luckily our friend stood still for the photo.  You may laugh, but this landscape is unique for its impermanence.  Park brochures state that these formations erode as much as 1 inch per year!  In other words, if we come back in 10 years or so, we won't be able to take the same photo.  Our friend will have aged and will look smaller and smoother.  Makes us sad.

To perhaps give you a more three-dimensional sense of this place, and how large the scale is and deep the landscape, check this link for a panoramic video taken at Panorama Point, one of the first viewpoints that a visitor encounters when entering the park from the north.

When we arrived at Cedar Pass Lodge, near the Ben Reifel Visitor Center, on Monday evening we had had a long day of driving, seeing Mount Rushmore, the Crazy Horse Monument, and the Needles Highway in Custer State Park.  The sun was already setting:

We had dinner, fell into bed, and arose early in the morning to this view of the nearest Badlands hills:

Just after sunset or sunrise are good times to catch wildlife.  Before we went to bed Moday night, Kathy spotted a rare black-footed ferret doing his unique little dancing hop across the parking lot across from our cabin.  Because it was too dark and the little guy was too fast for us to get a snapshot, here's what those little critters look like:

Black-footed ferrets are endangered species.  They were thought extinct until a small colony was discovered on a ranch in Wyoming.  The Badlands National Park agreed to work to reintroduce the species because it was native to this area.  Ferrets love to hunt prairie dogs and will inhabit prairie dog burrows right next door to the rest of the prairie dogs.  Some neighbor!

As we started out to explore the Badlands, we ran across this little bunny.  He was so small, that he didn't seem to know that he should be scared of us.  But he posed long enough for us to get a photo:

We took a drive on the Badlands Loop Road first thing in the morning, and were introduced to views like this along the way:

To give you an idea of scale, here is David standing out on a point in front of a typical Badlands landscape --

-- and here, Kathy works her way out onto another point:

North and east of the Badlands is the Bad River Prairie, which is harsh and inhospitable:

South and west of the Badlands is the White River Prairie, which stretches out to the horizon and the Black Hills at the horizon:

It was through this area that Chief Big Foot led his people toward a rendezvous with Chief Red Cloud, but instead was detained by the U.S. 7th Cavalry at Wounded Knee and mowed down - men, women and children.  The pass through which they trekked toward Wounded Knee is now called Bigfoot Pass.

Driving further out the loop road, we saw the transition from mountains to grassland prairie:

The loop road also led us through the various geologic layers, from the more recent layers of silt and volcanic ash, down through sandstone and sediment laid down by the ancient Western Interior Seaway that covered the Dakotas and most of the Great Plains for eons:

One layer of sediment is bright gold in color, lending its nature to the area known as the Yellow Mounds.  Here you can see the golden layers capped in redder, iron-laden sandstone at the Yellow Mounds Overlook:

Because these layers were of softer material, they eroded in smoother, rounder fashion than the sharp, younger layers that are more characteristic of the Badlands hills and mountains.

We finished our loop drive and overview of the Badlands feeling ready to hike down into the interior and see, touch, smell and hear what the Badlands could offer us as we walked through: